


wrapped around your ankles over the waterfall

by LuckyDiceKirby



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: High Chaos (Dishonored), M/M, the outsider sux unfortunately i love him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 12:31:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15707289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuckyDiceKirby/pseuds/LuckyDiceKirby
Summary: Corvo cuts Daud's throat. The Outsider finds this interesting.





	wrapped around your ankles over the waterfall

**Author's Note:**

> shrug emoji
> 
> Title from Heavy In Your Arms by Florence + the Machine. I have been waiting forever to name a Dishonored fic after this song because it's just. Very Dishonored.

Never let it be said that Corvo Attano doesn’t know how to handle a knife. He makes it quick. Daud hardly feels the cut as it crosses his throat. He’s already fading when Corvo tosses him over the side of the building. He doesn’t feel himself hit the ground.

When Daud contemplated death—a common enough way to kill time, for an assassin—he liked to think it might bring him peace. Foolish, to expect that peace was something he could ever have.

He opens his eyes. He’s lying on stone. The Outsider peers down at him, and around them the Void is no different than it’s ever been, gray and cool and harsh.

“It was a very pretty speech,” he says. “But Corvo Attano heard enough pretty words for a lifetime when he lived in Dunwall Tower. He spent his days learning that they only ever hid viciousness and cruelty, knives poorly sheathed. The Loyalists toasted him eloquently before they poured poison down his throat. Why should he have believed yours to be any different?”

Daud sits up and presses a hand to his neck, the place where Corvo’s knife cleaved his skin in two. His hand comes away bloody. It looks almost black in the gloom of the Void. 

“You saved me,” he says, voice shredded to pieces, and the Outsider laughs.

“I don’t take sides,” he says. The lying _bastard_. The moment Corvo Attano was Marked, the moment the Outsider decided he was _special_ , the outcome of this day was decided. “You’re dying, Daud, your life slipping out from between your fingers. A fitting end for a man who spent his life spilling a river of blood. I wonder what you’ll do with these final moments. Curse my name?”

“Fuck you.”

“Always so predictable,” the Outsider muses, and Daud hates him, hates himself, hates the sick curdling feeling he always gets in his gut when the Outsider sounds disappointed. Sounds bored. The same sickness that stayed with him for fifteen years while the Outsider ignored him, until Daud blundered his way into Corvo Attano’s life and suddenly became _interesting_ again. “You begged him for your life. I admit, Daud, that surprised me. And Corvo refused to give it to you. Your one last request denied. How does that feel, Daud? Like justice? Like redemption?”

It feels like blood sliding through Daud’s fingers, spilling down his coat. Dozens of people have bled on this coat. Jessamine Kaldwin did. And now Daud will be the last. “It doesn’t matter. It’s done.”

He wants it to be done. He wants the peace he knows he doesn’t deserve, but even now the Outsider won’t leave him alone, staring at him with his too dark eyes. It itches like bloodflies under his skin, the Outsider’s eyes on him, and yet Daud has never been able to hate it the way he should. He’s always craved it, as if he’s no better than the likes of Vera Moray, crooning to her rats about the black-eyed boy who will abandon her. Who abandons everyone, in time.

Corvo will feel like this one day. The thought should console Daud. It doesn’t.

“Of course it matters, Daud,” says the Outsider. He kneels down beside him and presses his hand against his throat, under Daud’s own. It’s cold, shocking enough that Daud starts, and the bastard laughs at that too. The Outsider has never touched him before. He would remember. “History is determined by men like Corvo Attano. By the men who kill Empresses and the men who take revenge. He could have let you live. He almost did. That future still hangs in the balance. A fish hooked but fighting against it. Soon enough it will have swum away.”

“So let me go,” Daud says. 

The Outsider runs his thumb along the edges of Daud’s wound. It should hurt. It does hurt. Daud doesn’t try to move away. “My throat was cut, once,” he says. “The day that I was made what I am. It’s a terrible way to die. I can’t remember how I felt about it. I was going to do what you did. I was going to beg for my life. But they never gave me the chance.”

He must be telling the truth. This close, Daud can see the scar. 

The Outsider draws his hand back, covered now in Daud’s blood. Daud knows precisely how much blood the human body can hold, and he’s bled too much for anywhere but the Void. 

“What would you have said?” Daud asks. He can’t look away from the Outsider’s hand.

The Outsider ignores him. He takes Daud’s jaw in his hand, smearing blood across his cheekbone, and tilts it to the side. He speaks into Daud’s ear. “Was it all my fault, Daud? Whispering in your ear, making you think you were _somehow important_?”

“You’re such a little _shit_ ,” Daud growls, and he has both hands fisted in the Outsider’s coat before he can think, before he can remember all the reasons that he has never dared touch the Outsider, no matter how much he loathes him. 

The Outsider watches him, and does not let him go. They would be breathing the same air, if either of them were breathing anymore. “With my Mark, you thought you were going to change things. And you have.”

“From where I stand, the world looks exactly the same.”

“You killed an Empress, and saved her daughter. History peeled away from the curve of your blade like skin from a knife. I gave you what you wanted, Daud: the power to make your own regrets.”

The Outsider slides his grip from Daud’s jaw back to his hair, and he yanks his head back. Daud chokes on nothing. He can feel blood dripping down his throat, can taste it on the back of his tongue. He clenches his fingers, and finds them too weak to hold onto the Outsider’s coat any longer.

“Are you going to let me die?”

“I haven’t decided yet.” The Outsider tilts his head. He looks _curious_. “Death made me what I am. I wonder what it would make of you.”

“A corpse,” Daud tells him. 

“Daud,” says the Outsider, still so fucking disappointed. “Your problem has always been that you lack a grander vision.”

“Dead is dead.”

“Not when it happened to me.” 

“I saw what was in Attano’s coat. If you make me into a _thing_ like you did to the Empress—”

“If I wanted to cut out your heart, you would sit still and let me,” the Outsider says. “You can try to hide it with all the anger in the world, Daud, but you would do anything for me.” His voice is dispassionate, as if he were not filleting Daud to the very bone with his words. “A word from me after fifteen years, and you picked yourself up out of your guilt and grief to scour Dunwall from end to end. You didn’t have to kill Delilah to save Emily Kaldwin. You killed her because you were jealous. You thought you could kill Corvo too. But after you’d already murdered his dear Jessamine, you couldn’t bring yourself to do it.”

“Shut up,” Daud says. A rasp from his ruined throat.

The Outsider kisses him, cold lips and colder tongue, and Daud makes the same noise people make when he slides a knife between their ribs. 

There’s blood on the Outsider’s mouth when he lets Daud go. Daud wants to kiss him again more than he wants to live.

“You should let me die. You should give Attano what he wants.”

“But I am,” the Outsider says. He touches Daud’s cheek, like the parody of a lover. “Corvo wanted his revenge. But more than that, he wants to be the kind of man above needing it. The kind of man who can raise his daughter well, and teach her to be kind, and good, and all the things that Empresses should be.”

Of course. Daud bleeding out before him, and it’s all about Corvo fucking Attano. "So you’re going to save me for Attano’s sake.”

“I told you,” the Outsider says, eyes more pitiless than the sea. “I haven’t decided yet.”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on twitter or tumblr as luckydicekirby; listen to me opine about my love for the Outsider and my cohost opine about her love for Daud on our podcast [The Drunken Whalers.](https://twitter.com/drunkenwhalers)


End file.
